


As Myself Or Not At All

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, First Meetings, Pre-Canon, Secret Identity, faking identities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-18
Updated: 2013-06-18
Packaged: 2017-12-15 08:34:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/847475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carol knows almost immediately that John Harrison does not exist any more than Carol Wallace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Myself Or Not At All

**Author's Note:**

  * For [samalander](https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/gifts).



> For samalander, who prompted me "Carol/Khan: I want to be loved as myself or not at all" and kept me company while I made myself write it.

*

Carol is never formally introduced to Commander Harrison, he is simply there when she returns from a three-week mission near the Romulan Neutral Zone. He does not introduce himself, or even look up when she bounces with a jaunty step into what was once _her_ secluded weapons laboratory.

“Oh,” Carol says, staring at the granite-carved profile of the stranger at her preferred console for an uncomfortable moment. It is when it occurs to her that he is not moving that she murmurs, “I beg your pardon,” and sedately walks to a less-favored but perfectly competent console. She likes the other console for its position near the corner, where she feels like she isn’t spoiling the idle peace of this particular laboratory. 

By the tension in his shoulders and the defensive spread of his feet, it is apparent that the stranger prefers the corner for its tactical position. Carol puts down her coffee, replicated to be triple-strength and smooth with cream, and accesses the personnel roster before she opens any of her files on Klingon photon torpedoes. It is this way that she learns that the stranger sharing her workspace is Commander John Harrison, Starfleet Intelligence.

She scarcely makes any progress with the Klingon weaponry in the coming week for watching him from the edge of her vision, but it is in this way Carol learns that whatever and whomever else he might be, Commander Harrison is a fiction.

*

“What is your name?”

It is over a month later, and the question is the first that Carol hears Commander Harrison’s voice and it makes her heart leap up into her throat. For a few seconds, she is mute, staring across the laboratory at him. The expression on his face is a cold mask of unwavering stone, but beneath even that is the promise of a fiery, passionate man. 

Carol tips her head to side, sending a cascade of golden hair across her cheek. She sweeps it back and swallows her silence to tell an old lie.

“Wallace, sir.” When her hair is out of her face, she flashes a shy, toothy smile at him. “Lieutenant Carol Wallace.”

She has told the lie so often, since she was a motherless girl half the quadrant away from a grieving and powerful father, that Carol almost believes it herself. 

Commander Harrison makes no indication that he has heard her. He watches as her smile falters and Carol turns her face back toward the work she has. She is good at this thing she does, the one thing that can make her useful to a distant admiral-father she does not know if she wants to approve of her, but when pressured, Carol is less adept at maintaining her illusions. 

Finally, after an age of watching Carol squirm under his gaze, Commander Harrison looks back to his console.

“It is a pleasure, Lieutenant Wallace, to make your acquaintance,” he says, and then nothing else for more than a week.

*

Admiral Marcus, Carol’s father, is off-planet much of the time since her return. Often, when he leaves on an unnamed mission, Commander Harrison disappears for a week or more. His work is highly classified, much more so than her clearance allows her access to, but she easily deduces from this pattern that it is done for Admiral Marcus, much like hers.

When Commander Harrison returns from one of these off-planet excursions, Carol knows already that it will be a week and a half before her father also returns. She is working in the laboratory when he returns, too engrossed in her work to know that it is the smallest hours of the morning, just after midnight. There is the matter of a blueprint for an exquisitely-designed torpedo prototype she has found tucked among her other work, which Carol does not recognize and which simultaneously excites and frightens her.

Though he looks as if he was preparing to begin working again immediately, Commander Harrison stands in the doorway and looks to her rather than his fastidiously maintained console. 

“Commander Harrison.” 

Carol greets him warmly, rises and immediately grips the edge of her console to steady her unsteady legs. It isn’t as if she is afraid of him, but Carol knows in some deep part of herself that she cannot allow him to see any weakness in her, not even the routine sort of exhaustion that causes her eyes to twitch in her skull. 

His mouth turns, awkwardly at first, into a half-charming smirk that seems out of place on his countenance. “I wonder what keeps you in the laboratory this late, Lieutenant Wallace?” he asks, striding like a cat after prey toward her console. 

“I have always had the terrible habit of working late,” Carol tells him, quite truthfully, and her hand goes to close the torpedo blueprints. “My father used to--” 

She is immediately silent but, since Commander Harrison has just closed his long, pale fingers around her wrist, she is able to pretend that it is only because she is surprised by his unusual behavior and not because she has nearly given up her lie. 

“I have been working on these torpedoes.” His eyes are pale flames now, fixated on Carol’s face rather than the console where an three-dimentional rendering of his creation is slowly rotating. “What do you think of them?”

He seems utterly unaware that his grip is tightening painfully on her wrist, but Carol does not struggle. Conversely, something hot twists in her stomach and she blinks rapidly. 

“Th-they are magnificent,” Carol answers truthfully, though she feels distant, tethered to her body only by her physical reaction to his presence. No amount of reminding herself that neither she nor he are who they say they are is enough to dampen her blade-sharp attraction to the Commander. 

Just as suddenly as he grabbed her, he releases her wrist. Carol immediately rubs the rosy ring of chafed flesh, wanting him all the more _for_ all the falsehoods between them, despite the shrieking alarm of wrongness she has been ignoring for as long as her whole life.

“Go to your quarters, Lieutenant,” Commander Harrison instructs her breathily, and Carol has no doubt that he knows precisely what he is doing to her, even if she has no notion _why_ he might do so, unless he suspects the truth behind her deception. 

Carol’s breath rattles through her trembling chest, but she borrows courage from herself and straightens. “I would like to see them, Commander. I am--weaponry is my field of expertise, I am--I am _passionately_ interested in seeing your work.”

She would like to see the torpedoes, if they are indeed built from the blueprints she has seen, and Carol cannot stifle the part of her that delights in the clockwork mechanics of the universe, the way that they may be manipulated to create, or destroy, or defend. But this is not merely about Commander Harrison’s work, or perhaps it is. Perhaps it is because Carol has watched him working mere steps away for months with his shoulders taut and his mouth set in a grim line and the key to whatever burns behind his cold exterior is in the work he has been doing. 

Perhaps Carol only wants to reach out and touch that kind of passion, to know what it is to do something for principle and ambition rather than the purity of knowledge. Perhaps she is only making excuses for wanting him.

Commander Harrison does not look surprised by this request when he considers it for several seconds that, to Carol, might as well be hours under his scrutinizing intensity. 

“Come with me,” he orders, and Carol follows.

*

There is a secret weapons bay that Carol has never set foot in just beyond a hidden door at the end of the hall. She has never thought twice about the rest of this corridor, and does not do so when Commander Harrison leads her into the wide room. He enters a code into the control panel and Carol hears a series of locks tumble into place inside the door. They are alone, but it feels different in the weapons bay than it did in her laboratory. Carol feels vulnerable, but she once again ignores the warning, choosing instead to walk between the long rows of torpedoes, counting softly to herself.

“There are seventy-two,” Commander Harrison tells her, a mere step behind her. Though Carol’s boots echo through the whole bay, his feet do not seem to ever make a single noise, something she did not think to notice before now. 

“You must be very proud of them.” Carol tears her eyes away from the rows of perfectly-built weapons, more striking in person than they might have ever been on her console.

The Commander’s hands are folded behind his back, but he loosens one, seeming to reconsider before taking her chin between his thumb and forefinger. Carol does not need to guess what it is he plans to do, some reckless part of her has been hoping for this for months. 

His kiss is lifeless at first, as though this is something he has not practiced in years, but Carol rests a palm on his hard stomach, sinks her teeth into his bottom lip, and his reaction is immediate. She hardly has time to lose herself in his ferocity, to enjoy the first _honest_ thing she’s ever felt from Commander John Harrison, when he breaks from her mouth and leaves a stinging line of kisses down her exposed throat. 

Carol’s whimpering gasp echoes back down toward her seconds later, hollow from its trip down the weapons bay, but she squirms at the sound and tips her head back further, struggling out of her boots while one of his hands pushes aside the hem of her dress, the other guiding her until her back is pressed against one of his torpedoes. 

Commander Harrison whispers her rank and stolen surname into reddening skin and Carol fights a scream when the veriest tip of his longest finger expertly traces her cleft until her whimpers become hoarse and desperate. There he touches her, circling his fingers into her wetness, teasing her ever-heightening levels of ecstatic arousal that Carol is convinced no one will ever bring her to again. 

Her fingers grasp for his uniform and she comes up with only a fistful of his hair. “Commander,” she pants, her words pained and drawn taut with the effort of speaking, “I want--Carol, just Carol, I’m not Wallace--you know I’m not--”

“I know. We have always known that we are neither of us what we seem,” the Commander rumbles in her ear and two of his fingers slip past her lust-swollen labia and curve upward. Carol stifles a yelp, her every muscle tightening with anticipation of what is now inevitable. He does not relent, and when her climax hits her with concussive force, Carol realizes that if John Harrison is not this man’s name, she doesn’t know what it is.

For a moment, Carol’s vision goes black, but she hardly has time to catch her breath before Commander Harrison’s mouth is on hers again. Carol is clumsy with the button on his uniform trousers, but she manages only that with shaking fingers; he is the one who frees his erection from them. 

“Are you prepared?” His voice is steady, betraying no emotion, not even his perfectly apparent desire for her. 

“Yes,” Carol answers savagely.

She pulls him toward her, crushes her chapped lips against his and digs her fingernails into his shoulders as she braces herself against the torpedo and slings her leg around his hip. Commander Harrison takes her without hesitation or measure, the ruby-red of the tip sliding down from her clitoris to her entrance one moment and Carol meeting the full force of his thrust with a quiet hiccup the next. 

She wants to watch his face when he fucks her, attentive to her slightest cry and doggedly pursuing her pleasure as if it pleases him as well. Commander Harrison frightens her this way, but no more than she frightens herself. He is like a mirror to Carol, to see the parts of her that she does not want anyone to see, not even herself. When she finally does see his face, his eyes are closed and his mouth is set implacably and Carol understands. His borrowed body, this borrowed identity he pretends is his own, is borrowed like her mother’s name and no more effective as a mask for their true identities.

Carol understands. Perhaps that is why he sought her out. 

She arches her back and reaches down to touch herself, crying upward with delight when the Commander adds his hand to hers. Carol feels herself flutter tightly around the slow, deep throbbing of his climax, and screams as she loses her composure entirely to numbing, honest bliss.

*

Carol is not surprised when she comes to her laboratory the next morning to find the room as serenely empty as it was before Commander Harrison took up his work in it. He is gone already, as if he was never there.

Indeed, she thinks wryly and sets her coffee on the console that used to be hers and used to be his, it isn’t as if he ever existed at all.


End file.
